


After-comers Cannot Guess The Beauty Been

by AstridContraMundum



Series: After-comers Cannot Guess [11]
Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: Bixby isn't sure what to think, Canon becomes the AU, Endeavour’s thoughts on Star Wars, I get KILLED?, I have a deranged identical twin??, M/M, The (sweet) tea on Bix’s real backstory y’all, Who is this Monica?, Why am I pulling for her and Endeavour to get together?, Young Joss’ thoughts on Faulkner and Fitzgerald, what???
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-19
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-07-08 17:26:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19873333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstridContraMundum/pseuds/AstridContraMundum
Summary: It's right there, beside the crossword he still sets aside by habit: an ad for a new movie.As A Circling Bird: The Life and Loves of Endeavour Morse.Damned if Bixby will go and see the thing.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is inspired by a prompt given by an anonymous guest... 
> 
> I hope you'll like it, and that it’s a bit what you had in mind. :D
> 
> It’s 2012, but there is no detective series called Endeavour. Instead, there’s a movie chronicling the life of the poet Endeavour Morse. But what will Bixby make of it?

She’s very direct, Esme. But she is, Bixby supposes, French. So there’s that.

Somehow, she has a way of popping out with things, things that Bix had always felt he could say only under an umbrella of soft allusion and intimation.

Or even things he thinks never to bring up at all.

He hasn't spoken with her for three months, but, as soon as he picks up the phone, she immediately asks, “Have you seen them? The ads?”

Bixby sighs.

After all of these years, every now and then, by sheer force of habit, Bixby still pulls the arts and entertainment section from his newspaper first, to save the crossword for Endeavour.

And then, just the other morning, he saw it: a picture of a man who looked so like Endeavour as to momentarily rob him of breath—a man with the same austere cheekbones and stubborn chin—a man with even Endeavour's uncannily big blue eyes—standing alone in the center of a bleak and forsaken moor.

For a moment, Bixby wasn’t sure what to make of it, until his eyes fell to the words below, written across the green-gray grass in white script: 

_As A Circling Bird_

_The Life and Loves of Endeavour Morse_

It was a film, a movie for God’s sake.

Oh, hell.

He had set the paper aside, resolving to avoid that section for the next several weeks, resolving to pretend as if he’d never seen it. But now, Esme has asked him about it point blank, and so he has to say it.

“Yes,” Bixby tells Esme. “I’ve seen them.”

There’s a pause.

“I’ll go with you, if you want,” she says.

Bixby huffs a laugh. “I’m not going to see the damn thing.”

He already saw the original. Why would he need to see a remake?

“You know you’re going to,” Esme says. “ _I’m_ going to. But I don’t want to go alone, really. And I don’t want you to, either. You notice what they’re calling it, don’t you?”

Well, of course, they would seize upon _that_ book. Whatever Endeavour had said to Mrs. Pettybon through the Thursdays’ television screen notwithstanding, more than one of Endeavour’s poems do contain a bit of a sexual charge— and the collection found in _As A Circling Bird_ tops them all.

Bixby always liked to think that perhaps it was because Endeavour had been missing him, wandering around alone up in Scotland, but he knows it might just as well not be the case. Bix is old enough to see now how often he tends to put himself at the center of things, just as he always was, in his youth, the glittering center of every party.

But more and more, as he stands under the scatter of stars, he realizes just how small a figure in the wide universe he really is—how many things there are that he simply does not know.

Where Endeavour is now or what he is doing being at the top of that list.

“Yes, I noticed that,” Bixby tells Esme, wearily. “Do you know who this actor is? Shaun Evans? He really does look a lot like him.” 

“I don’t know. He was on a comedy, in Britain. _Teachers_ ,” Esme says.

Then, there is a pause.

“He played ‘the gay one,'” Esme says.

Bixby groans. “Oh, God.”

So, just as Bixby expected from the title of the film, this is what it will be all about, then: a complicated tale of the most beautiful soul Bixby had ever encountered reduced to one titillating question.

_Gee, which team was he batting for, anyway?_

He expects some reprimand from Esme, once he’s expressed his sense of dismay. This, probing, this dissecting dressed up as "openness," might be just the sort of thing she approves of. She has so many Views On Things, and she doesn’t like it all if you don’t share them, or even if you do, and are simply a bit more reticent about them, simply more inclined, as Bixby is, to keep one’s private life private.

He’s lucky, really, that she’s speaking to him at all, he supposes. This time last year, she had left the house in a cloud of impatience, all but shaking the dust from her feet as she went.

She had been organizing some sort of Pride march at the university where she teaches, and had asked him to speak at the rally, but he had begged off, telling her he wouldn’t be the best person for the job, since he was basically straight.

There had been a long pause.

“What?” she asked, blankly.

“What do you mean, ‘ _what?_ ’” Bixby asked.

“How can you say that? You were with Endeavour for _thirty_ years. You took him to Denmark to get married as soon as it was legal, for god’s sakes. You were ground-breakers!”

“Well. Yes. But that was Endeavour,” Bixby said.

And how could he explain? It wasn’t the sort of thing he would happily discuss with anyone at all, really, let alone Esme, who was the closest thing he would ever have to a daughter, even though she wasn’t quite young enough to be. It was just too damn . . . awkward? uncomfortable?

Just wrong on any number of levels, really. 

What could he say? He was, basically, attracted to women, that was all there was to it. There were some men, too, it was true, who over the years had caught his eye, but . . . 

But Endeavour. There was no one who could hold a candle to him really, in Bixby’s eyes.

Because it was Endeavour’s eyes he had fallen in love with first; not just because they were luminous and breathtakingly beautiful, but because of the way he had looked at him once, at a party, as though he saw right through him, as if he knew he was a fraud.

Then, one afternoon, he looked at him again, as if he forgave him for it.

And then he had pulled him off the dock— despite the fact that Bix was wearing a rather expensive suit—and down into the lake with him, laughing that laugh that sounded just like the ripple of water.

The first look had captured Bix's imagination, the second his heart.

But he hadn't wanted to explain this. Not to Esme.

“It just . . . I don't know. Does it matter one way or the other? I loved Endeavour because he was Endeavour, not because he was a man or a woman. Sometimes I even sort of wished he _was_ a woman. Not for me, but . . . . for him. He would have made a good father,” Bix had said. 

Esme had put her hand to her forehead, as if she had a tremendous headache coming on. “Oh. My. God. I should be angry, but . . . You are just honestly the most confused person I have ever met.”

“You know what I mean,” Bix had said. And if she had felt impatient with him, now he did with her.

Who did she imagine spent endless hours on the carpet playing Pêche with her children? Who did she think took them out in the woods looking for Chinky and Moon Face? Who did she think set up their tent so they could go “camping” in their back garden while she and Marcel were off on their little romantic weekends in Provence?

Bix had had phone calls to make in those days.

But today, Esme seems to be on his side. Endeavour, the real Endeavour, belongs to them. And now he’ll be sold for seven Euro a ticket, scrutinized like an insect under a microscope by movie goers munching on popcorn and slurping sodas noisily through straws. 

Today, they are united.

How will the story get told? That is their main concern. Bix certainly never talked to any of these writers or producers. Nor has Esme or Guillaume.

Whoever the script writers talked to, they will be the ones to color the story, to determine which Endeavour is projected onto that one-dimensional screen.

But who? Who would have talked to them? Not Win Thursday. But Strange, perhaps? Or George and Shirley? He can’t see Tony involving himself in a project like this. But Kay?

Or could it be Bruce? Box? Susan? Jerome Hogg?

Oh, God.

*************

The movie begins with his mother’s death. It’s a shame, really. Bixby wouldn’t have minded seeing Endeavour when he was first Endeavour, before he was Morse, before he had any secrets. It needn't have been anything much, really. It would have been nice, just to see him climbing a tree or looking cautiously and carefully into a bird’s nest or just walking by a brook, idly along.

Bixby’s siblings had all died before he was born, and, strangely enough, when he and Endeavour were older, Bix found himself wishing more and more that he had met him long ago, even though, in their childhood years, an ocean had separated them.

He would not have minded seeing a younger Endeavour, sitting in the branches of a tree, reading a book. He would have projected himself onto the screen, barefoot and tossing around a squashed, brown football. 

“Hey, kid. We’re getting a game together. Wanna play?” Josiah would ask, and Endeavour would wrinkle his nose.

But instead, the movie begins right as he's trundled off to his father’s and Gwen’s. It’s all very artfully done, the mood set in a montage of shots: Endeavour hiding in his room and listening to records while his father and stepmother fight downstairs, Endeavour reading a storybook to Joycie while their father and her mother fight downstairs.

There are a few uplifting scenes as well: Epic shots of blue skies and green fields, Endeavour riding Joycie about on the handlebars of an old bike. One gathers that the audience is meant to infer that already young Morse is destined for bigger and better things, as he traverses the tranquil landscape, standing up on the pedals to make the bike go faster, to make Joycie laugh. They are off, away from the grim brick house, away from Cyril and Gwen, finding a space in which to dream. 

Bixby looks over at Esme, and she’s smiling slightly at the scene, her beautiful oval face illuminated in the blue screen light.

But Bixby finds himself wondering who they spoke to to get all of this. Could it be Joyce? Would she talk to them? Perhaps so. These are all innocent enough memories; there is no reason why she should not have shared them. 

And then, time passes, and instead of a teenaged actor playing Endeavour, sitting quietly at the back of the class, it’s the man Bix had seen in the ad, Shaun Evans.

Endeavour is looking out the window when a teacher comes to the door and informs Morse that he is to go and speak to the headmaster. Endeavour is perplexed; he isn't the sort of boy usually called out of class. 

It's a funny flicker of a look, subtle and so like Endeavour's that Bixby begins to relax a little. He isn't quite sold on the writers, but this Shaun Evans, Bix feels, is all right, really. He seems as if he's set on playing Endeavour as a person, not just as a type, as Bixby had so feared. 

The camera follows Endeavour down a long hall and into the more formal setting of the office. A man behind a large desk hands him a letter—it's an offer of a scholarship, of course, to Oxford. 

It’s an odd moment, ironic, one supposes. Endeavour looks as if he might pass out from happiness, but the audience, of course, already knows that he's walking straight to Susan and Henry and mad attempts at bacchanals.

The audience knows, already, that his years at Oxford are doomed. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally caught up with the show :D

Endeavour arrives in Oxford with a suitcase and a record player, and as he meanders down the sidewalk, casting his face up to a skyline composed of dreaming spires, the soundtrack soars with the swelling rise of Faure’s Requiem.

He seems happy enough, walking beneath the Bridge of Sighs, sitting in tutorials diffused with a weak academic light, pulling books off a library shelf with narrow and nimble hands.

It’s clear he’s found his ivory tower. A secluded universe in which to think and read and dream away the hours, free of the threat of Gwen banging on his door to give him hell about one thing or another.

But as Endeavour goes about his quiet and solitary way, a group of students seems to be gathering at the edges of each scene, standing out against the background of marble columns and introspective silences like bright pieces of broken glass, luminescent, but sharp.

Endeavour seems to find them all thoroughly alarming: he gives them a wide berth, or else ducks his head down at their approach.

But then, the camera angle shifts, and the perspective changes to that of the glittering group of students, who are now gathered in a library at a long wooden table, one polished to glow like fire.

Until now, the audience has seen the world only through Endeavour’s eyes, but in film, it takes only the swivel of a lens to turn the subject into the object. 

The seven students are arguing as they translate a passage of poetry: accusative versus dative—how best to describe the movement of a ship toward Carthage—is the subject of the debate.

Bixby huffs a laugh.

Pressing stuff.

A dapper young man and a blonde woman redolent with an icy sort of beauty put their heads together over a page.

The casting is off a bit here, perhaps, but Bixby understands at once who they are meant to be: Tony and Susan. Tony dresses much more flamboyantly than Bixby had ever seen him do in real life; it’s like he’s some sort of 1950s Lord Byron. He must cringing somewhere, if he's seen this thing.

The man who must be Tony raises an eyebrow, watching Endeavour browse the stacks from across the room. Susan follows his gaze, looking thoughtful. Then she smiles.

“Oh, no. I don’t think so,” Susan says, with a laugh.

“What?” Tony asks, affronted.

“He’s not for you,” she says.

“Oh, no? I suppose you think you have the better chance, then?”

Susan shrugs. “Maybe. I’d say so.”

“Fifty quid says otherwise,” Tony says.

“All right,” she agrees. “And one hundred if you find out his Christian name.” 

And then they laugh, in a vaguely unpleasant manner.

Kay.

It must be Kay: Kay who talked to the scriptwriter. 

It rings, true, that little wager. They were always doing things that, when Bixby had first met them, back in that summer of '67. One hundred quid says I beat you back to the house. Fifty quid says Bunny loses his shirt tonight. Fifty quid says Bruce mentions that Lisbon deal. Again.

They sound thoroughly heartless, making Endeavour into just another one of their contests, but, at this point, he’s only a stranger in the library, and, therefore, according to their rules, fair game.

Bixby is sure, though, that either of them would be mortified to have such words brought to light now.

But what would Kay care, if they were embarrassed? 

She and Susan never really did get along, and, over the years, a growing animosity had sprung up between Kay and Tony as well. 

Bixby didn’t quite know what it was all about, but then, he never did understand that crowd.

What he had said to Inspector Thursday when he had first met him was true: when it came to Endeavour’s Oxford friends, Bix was an outsider looking in, a visitor to a botanic garden, strolling through a hothouse brimming with plants that had grown in their own strange ways—neglected and sometimes even deprived of the sun—so that it was impossible to tell where one vine began and where another ended, which plants were choking out the healthy growth of the other.

Endeavour had stayed well out of Kay and Tony’s increasing rancor, seeming to take neither side.

“Tony doesn’t understand. She thinks like a mother now. She’s forgiven him,” Endeavour said once, leaving Bixby to conclude that the root of the problem was that Tony had lost all respect for Kay because—despite everything—she had decided to stay with Bruce.

But, after Rose was born, it was true that Bruce grew far less insufferable, far less boorish. It was as if he had experienced some sort of an epiphany, in his own limited way.

He was the father of a family now, and he seemed to realize, for the first time, that his actions had ramifications, that his priorities had been sadly out of line. 

Bixby understood. He had experienced a similar revelation during one of their summers in Oxford, in the days following the catastrophic collapse of Cranmer House. 

Some might find it incredible, or even say it was impossible for Bixby to be able to empathize with Bruce's newfound identity as a family man—considering his own life had taken a somewhat more . . . shall we say ... unconventional turn.

Bix might have thought so once himself.

But there you are. 

At any rate, if Kay is indeed the scriptwriter’s source, Bixby is sure that Susan and Tony are in for some rough treatment. 

And he can't help but feel sympathy for them both.

He also can't help but wonder .... Kay doesn’t have any axe to grind with _him_ , has she?

He certainly hopes not.

******** 

It’s Endeavour's first day joining the little band of eccentrics in Julian Morrows' tutorial: the moth has fallen straight into the web.

“ _Cubitum_ _eamus_?” Tony asks, as Endeavour comes into room.

Endeavour looks at him blankly, his face utterly calm and expressionless; he understands the words, he just doesn’t know what on earth to make of them.

Susan laughs merrily as Tony's attempt at flirtation goes down in flames. Endeavour slips toward the back of the room, looking as if perhaps Oxford won’t be so very different from Lincolnshire after all.

Bruce, sitting in the other chair near the back of the room, eyes him appraisingly, as if he's trying to decide whether or not he's worth addressing. 

“Bruce Belborough,” he says, at last.

“Morse,” Endeavour says.

"Morse? That’s all?” Bruce asks. “You needn’t stand on ceremony with us. What's your Christian name?”

“No one knows,” Susan says. “Perhaps he doesn’t have one.”

“Oh?" Bruce asks. "Well, If he doesn’t have a Christian name, he must be a . . . "

_Pagan._ Bix supplies the word in his head, at the moment that Bruce says it. The word comes as a jolt from some other world. 

It seems incredible that he had once known Endeavour only by that name, and now, forty-five years later, he had almost completely forgotten that he had ever used it. 

Bruce turns away, looking satisfied with his little joke, and the students settle into their chairs as another, older man—who can only be Julian Morrow—glides into the room and begins to speak.

And the rest is history.

Or rather, a secret history.

“Genuine beauty is rarely soft or conciliatory,” Morrow says. “After all, what are the scenes in poetry graven on our memories? The murder of Agamemnon, the wrath of Achilles, Dido on the funeral pyre. The traitors and the daggers and Caesar’s blood.”

“Death is the mother of beauty,” Henry says quietly.

“And what is beauty?”

“Terror,” Henry replies.

“And if beauty is terror, what is desire?”

“To live,” Endeavour says.

“To live _forever_ ,” amends Bunny, who doesn’t know it yet, but will be the first among them to die.

******

They are in a field at the edge of the woods, in chitons, drinking around the bonfire.

Bunny passes Endeavour a bottle.

“I don’t drink,” the Endeavour on the screen says, and, out of the corner of his eye, Bixby sees Esme raise an eyebrow.

Endeavour might not yet drink, but the others can certainly put a lot away. Soon they are all three sheets to the wind, their recitations of Greek poetry growing inelegant and slurred as the bonfire rages to the wine-dark sky.

And then the camera cuts to an aerial shot, looking down on them from above, and the audience is given to understand that time has passed, and that they have all of them passed out; Endeavour alone is awake, looking up at the stars in the glow of the fire, and the expression on his face is clear.

How the hell did I get here?

They bacchanal scenes are shot with an increasing level of surrealism. The friends wake up at dawn, strewn about in a circle around the ashes of the fire, draped in the chitons Susan made for them.

A group of eight half-naked college students waking up in piles of twos and threes raises all sorts of implications, and suddenly Bixby remembers what Sylive had said years ago as he stood with her in front of a bookshop window. 

_“They were holding bacchanals. What do you think? That they were sitting around and reading Greek poetry?”_

Bixby begins watching a bit more closely; he’s can’t help but be curious, but he’s not sure if he wants any surprises, either— for any ghostly loves to be resurrected on the screen that are best left locked in that old and dusty trunk that is the past, that are best left undisturbed.

Especially as Endeavour is not here to tell him what is true and what is only a filmmaker’s fancy.

The night of the final bacchanal is shot with a eerie, dreamlike quality. The camera dances and turns around the fire. Vines grow out of the ground, and the sky melts to violet. And the friends whose fates will forever more be linked are off and running, scattering through the fields in different directions.

What happens next is kept all rather vague—most likely, Bixby supposes, because the filmmakers are keen to avoid a spate of lawsuits.

In the following days, tempers are short, and the friends fight over nothing.

Endeavour asks Henry for the newspaper, and Susan snaps at him.

“Can’t you live without that crossword one damn day?”

Bunny looks at her. “Why shouldn’t Pagan see the paper, if he wants? Where is it, Henry?”

And, of course, they don’t want Endeavour to see the paper.

He’s not a detective yet, but he’ll certainly find it odd to read about the grisly murder of a man in the very fields in which they had staged their bacchanals.

Susan and Henry grow so desperate, they even begin hatching plans to flee the country, to go to . . . Argentina.

 _Argentina_?

Bix can tell that the same thought occurs to Esme at the same time, and they look at one another, surprised.

That summer they had all left Oxford together, when Esme and Guillaume had been at the colleges for that English immersion program, Endeavour had been preoccupied by the idea that the kids might get lost in the airport, end up getting on the wrong plane.

“Can't you stay with the group? Do you want to end up in Argentina?” Endeavour said, looking back over his shoulder, admonishing them for not keeping up.

Esme, thank god, had cottoned on to the fact that Endeavour hated the airport: the lights, the roar of the crowds, the jostle of elbows, the announcements filled with more static than words— she realized that, by reassuring them, he was really seeking to reassure himself. Looking after them was keeping him distracted from his own anxieties, and so she played along.

“Which is the gate? E7?” she asked.

“E7,” Endeavour said. “E7. And be sure to check it says Paris, too,” he added mournfully. “They love to change the gates at the last minute. No chance to create more chaos knowingly overlooked.”

Guillaume, however, took Endeavour’s warnings at face value and grew sullen, which actually worked to make the ruse all the more believable. “I’m not seven,” he said, scowling. 

“Says the boy who just lost his passport last week,” Esme said.

_“Argentina?”_ Esme murmurs wonderingly, her face full of bewilderment. 

Bixby shrugs. Could this be the source then, for that quirky little fear? 

Her guess is as good as his.

And then Endeavour and Susan are standing on a bridge. “It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s just . . . you’ll never understand me. Henry is the only one who will ever understand me.”

And Endeavour’s face closes over. He’s right back to square one—he’s the boy who sat in the back of the class in Lincolnshire.

Endeavour is in a soldier’s uniform, his hair cropped short, packing a duffel bag. He walks out of a flat littered with records across the floor, and slowly closes the door. Endeavour is leaving Oxford. The scene fades slowly to black.

Then, suddenly, a man is on a bus, reading a newspaper. And three words come up across the screen.

_Four years later._

What? Will Bix _never_ know what the hell Endeavour did in the Army? Was he involved in some sort of top secret mission? Or was he just so quiet, so withdrawn in his self-imposed little exile that no one knew him, no one remembered him, no one could be consulted as a source?

And who the hell is this guy reading the paper?

Whoever he is—he's reading aloud an article on a missing woman, Evelyn Balfour. 

“Anyone with information pertaining to her disappearance should contact Detective Inspector Fred Thursday at Cowley Police Station Oxford. It is believed that extra officers from Carshall Newton are being sent in to reinforce the search,” the man says.

Then the man lowers the paper. 

“Well, that’s us, isn’t it?” 

And then the camera cuts to Endeavour, who is sitting in the next seat: he is looking out the bus window, his chin held high, watching the steeples and dreaming spires drift by, as Faure’s Requiem again begins to sound.

And he’s going back to Oxford, right about the time Bixby is somewhere in his own corner of the universe, buying the house on Lake Silence.

*********

Evelyn Balfour is found dead in a boxcar, and Endeavour is set on the case; he is working late into the night, sitting under a desk lamp, the office lights dimmed, when a man in a fedora stops to speak with him.

And it’s Thursday.

Bixby begins to feel as if he’s been on a long journey, and that he’s made the turn toward home, where all the landmarks begin to look increasingly familiar.

In the next scene, Endeavor goes to the dead woman’s home, to search for clues, but the place is empty; there is no officer posted at the door. He walks in, looking around for someone, utterly perplexed.

And then, a big man with a broad, friendly face comes lumbering down the stairs, ducking his head on the low ceiling at the top of the landing.

“You’re meant to be on the door,” Endeavour snaps.

“Sorry,” the man, who can only be Jim Strange, says. “I just come off nights. It’s playing havoc with my . . .”

But Endeavour cuts him off, and Shaun Evans mimics that disgusted little face Endeavour always used to make so perfectly that Bixby almost wants to laugh out loud.

“I think I can live without the details of your digestive timetable,” Endeavour sniffs. “I could have just wandered in for a bit of housebreaking.”

“If you’re gonna be like that, let’s see some identification, matey,” the man says. “Sharpish.”

Endeavour whips out his warrant card, and the man’s face goes still, as if the name he reads there explains everything.

“Oh. _You’re_ Morse.”

He pauses for a beat. 

“Strange.”

“What is?” Endeavour asks, his impatience leaping by bounds. 

“I am.”

“Me.”

“My name.”

“Jim Strange.” 

The odd little scene offers itself as such a pivotal moment, rings so true to life, that Bixby can’t help but think that Strange himself is the source of it—and is therefore most likely the source of all the information garnered covering Endeavour’s years with the CID.

Unconsciously, Bixby relaxes further into his folding seat. He knows Strange would not be unfair to Endeavour; Bixby has nothing to worry about.

No unwelcome or sudden surprises await him.

Endeavour is in his squalid little bedsit one night, stewing over the case, looking over odd notes and opera references left behind by a mad serial killer, when there is a soft knock at the door.

“Sorry to knock, but you haven’t got a tanner have you?” a beautiful girl—with shining eyes that are darker and even more brilliant than Bixby’s own—says. “I’ve something on the stove to warm, and the gas had gone.”

“Come in,” Endeavour says, shuffling back from the door like the awkward sod he is.

“I’ll let you have it back,” she says.

“Call it quits if you’ve a tin opener I can borrow,” Endeavour replies.

Bixby frowns, perplexed.

What is happening here? 

Are they . . . . ? The girl seems to be the one woman in the world as bashful and as uncertain and as locked in her head as Endeavour is, so it’s a bit difficult to tell . . . . but . . . .

... Are they _flirting_?

“Just moved in, have you?” she asks.

“Weekend last.”

“Oh. Well. I’m Monica.”

“Morse.”

A long pause.

“I’ll fetch the opener,” she says. 

“You wouldn’t have an iron, would you? Mine’s given up the ghost,” Endeavour calls, as she’s going out the door.

Bixby huffs a quiet laugh. He had never known Endeavour to iron one thing in the entire course of thirty years.

But the girl flashes a shy smile. “Stretching that sixpence aren’t you?”

And . . . they _are_. They are _flirting_. Is she real, this girl? Endeavour had never mentioned her. If the Endeavour of this scene didn’t strike so truly on target, Bix might be tempted to believe that this is all completely fiction, just a little bit of a “mandatory love interest” tacked on for the sake of the movie.

“So, what do you do?” Monica asks.

“What do you _think_ I do?” Endeavour replies.

Oh my god. The poor things. Bixby isn’t sure whether to laugh or to cry.

Monica takes in his mess of a room, considers the books shoved into every available nook and cranny of Endeavour's little hovel.

“A teacher, maybe?" she ventures. "In the colleges? All of these books.”

She looks at him, expectantly. “Are you?”

“I’m a policeman.”

“You don’t look like a policeman,” Monica says.

“What do policemen look like?” Endeavour asks.

And, once again, Endeavour has stepped right into it. Bixby can think of a hundred lines right off the top of his head.

_I_ _don’t_ _know_ , _but_ _if_ _they_ _all_ _look_ _like_ _you_ , _I_ _might_ _be_ _tempted_ _to_ _take_ _up_ _a_ _life_ _of_ _crime_.

_Not like you, in the main, but you certainly look like you know how to put a man under arrest._

But all Monica says is, “Not like you.” 

“Thanks for the opener,” he says.

“Welcome.”

“I’ll, erm. Night.”

“Good night.”

And that is that.

But, despite his complete lack of conversational finesse, Endeavour, it seems, hasn’t blown it. Monica comes over again, wearing a nurse’s cap and carrying a tray with tea and a poached egg.

And then, Endeavour, the most brilliant and brightest man that Bixby had ever met, says it:

“You’re a nurse.”

Beside him, Esme giggles. 

“Is it the uniform?” Monica asks. And they smile sweetly at one another.

And that's about it.

Bixby wills one of them to say _something_ , for heaven’s sakes, but no, they can’t pull it off.

Endeavour and Monica run into each other in front of a mattress store, and the salesman mistakes them for a married couple. They get a big charge out of playacting the roles, trying out mattresses as if they are a happily married couple, settled and secure, out on a little domestic errand, instead of two desparately lonely people who don’t quite see a way forwards. They try the mattress out, lying side by side, and smile daftly at each other.

And Bixby feels a pang in his chest.

Such a thing certainly never happened to _them_.

At unfamiliar restaurants, they were always given separate checks, even after they wore matching gold bands.

Endeavour and Monica are watching the fireworks and embracing under the stars, Endeavour heads off on her moped, chasing down a lead. There's the obligatory candlelit dinner scene, where they murmur to one another in the soft light, with faces full of hope. 

And then, Endeavour is back at the CID, where it is revealed that the opera killer has kidnapped a little girl. Endeavour is chasing the madman through the stacks of the Bodleian, when, suddenly, a dark figure lurches out from behind a shelf and stabs him.

Sweet Jesus.

What the hell? Bixby had always assumed that Endeavour had that scar from running into something. He was more than a little clumsy.

The killer gets away, runs off into the night, and Endeavour gets stitched up by a very aptly played DeBryn, complete with waspish voice and a bowtie.

It strikes Bixby as funny that Tony has been portrayed as such a sexy bastard, dressed like some nineteenth century French marquis, when Bix's true rival is reduced to a mere background character, whose entire vocabulary consists of phrases such as, "And it’s good night, Irene," and, "Shall we say three o'clock?" 

It maxes Bix feel a bit odd, that of all the people in this crowded theater, he’s the only one who knows this.

In fact, he might be the only person on the _planet_ who knows this.

It’s lonely as hell, getting old.

The screen goes dim with dusk and rain, and Endeavour heads for home, alone along the shadowed streets. He has nothing more to go on. In his bedsit, he puts on a record and sits on the floor, turning over bits of paper and anagrams, and running his hands through his wavy hair. The aria on the turntable soars as his movements grow more desperate, and then there’s another soft knock at the door.

“Hey, now, you’re shaking,” Monica says. “What’s so bad it’s got you this way? Huh?”

“A mother has lost her daughter. That has to be put right. If I can’t do that, there’s nothing. There. See? You can add cowardice to my list of offences,” Endeavour manages, his voice choking with the threat of tears.

But Monica smiles solemnly.

“You’re not yellow. You’re just blue,” she says with a degree of tenderness with which Bixby never once in his life spoke to him.

Endeavour looks at her with such wonder and gratitude in his big soulful blue eyes that Bixby feels another pang. He should have been there. It should been _him_ to have comforted him that night.

Although what would he have said?

“Why don’t you buck up, old man? It’s can’t be so bad, can it?” And then he’d pour them out two tumblers of Scotch.

Bixby sighs.

_A moi. L’historie d’une de mes foiles._

Bix isn’t sure what expression he must have on his face, but, suddenly he can sense Esme is watching him. She leans over and murmurs in his ear. “They are awfully serious, aren’t they? Do you think she ever knew what a wiseacre Endeavour could be?”

Bixby huffs a quiet laugh. It is true—there is something skittish in Endeavour’s dealings with Monica; he’s definitely trying hard to keep up his best face, as if he’s scared to death he might make the wrong move, put her off if he so much as sneezes the wrong way.

He certainly never seemed to stand on ceremony like that with _him._ Anytime Bixby ever dropped Endeavour a line he thought too much, he’d look at him haughtily, give him some clever clogs answer.

_“What’s your name, baby?”_

_“Josephine.”_

_“I thought we said happily ever after, old man.”_

“ _How American.”_

For all that they smile sweetly, they never seem comfortable enough to laugh.

_"I’m a what?"_

_"A classic summer."_

_"Please don’t say we’re doing this," Endeavour said, laughing that laugh that sounded like air being let out of a balloon._

Bixby feels like a bastard, picking apart something so pure just to make himself feel better. But. There you are. 

And, anyway, it’s no use. Because there he is, doing the crossword, while she is knitting him a scarf. A _scarf_ , of all things.

Never in his life had he ever knitted Endeavour a scarf.

Bixby can hardly take another minute.

Endeavour might have had a life without secrets, a life in a cozy little rowhouse, he and Monica pulling along side by side, building a life together. It would have been his own children he helped with their studies, and not Esme and Guillaume. At the holidays, when they were older, Monica would work to give their house a festive air, welcoming their family home. 

She certainly wouldn’t have taught their grandchildren how to beat even the best at poker.

“Happy?” Endeavour asks.

“Yeah,” she says.

Bixby groans. Because even he, bizarrely enough, can't help but pull for them. But of course, he knows, everyone knows, it's all doomed.

Who could have told them all of this?

The answer comes to him simply.

In scene after scene, the two are alone.

It could only be the girl herself.

And why shouldn’t she?

She was a nurse and he was a police officer: what could have been more natural? What could make more sense? They might have been the perfect match.

This Monica, wherever she is, has no secret past, no false passports, nothing to hide. Why shouldn't she share the tale of a boy she loved for an hour, and who loved her in return? It’s a story she must have told just as it was, without a need for dissemblance or embellishment. 

Yet, Bixby is fairly certain that, after Endeavour left prison, he went straight to the lake house, that he didn't even return to Oxford to retrieve his belongings. That means, most likely, that he completely cut this girl off, that he never even stopped to tell her good bye.

It seems to go against the grain of what Bixby knows of human nature for Monica to be able to tell this story, in light of that fact, without any hint of bitterness.

He can’t help but wonder if they had ever met again, if they had ever run into one another during one of the many times he and Endeavour had gone to Oxford, if they had settled things between them, for her to be able to relate the loveliness of the memory and leave off all the rest. 

Wouldn’t Endeavour have told him, though?

Although what would he have said?

Bixby furrows his brow, considering the screen.

Since it could only be Monica who had spoken to the scriptwriter, he supposes he’ll find out one way or another by the movie’s end.

One thing is clear: Bix can tell, that, wherever she is, she must be happy with her life, with how it unfolded. 

Wherever she is, she’s forgiven him.

Endeavour is back at the CID, his narrowed eyes scanning the evidence posted on the wall. And then he cracks the code. The next victim is Fay Madison. He and Thursday and Strange race to Alfredus College. 

Endeavour tackles the mad opera killer on the roof. Bixby remembers vaguely, Thursday telling him of such a thing, during that spring they had visited them in France, when Endeavour had been abducted by those art thieves.

At the time, Bixby thought that Thursday was laying it on a bit thick, weaving a tale of Endeavour’s bravery in the face of danger in order to comfort him.

But Strange seems to remember it all exactly the same way, so it must be true.

What’s more, Endeavour tackles the man with the same lanky grace with which he had fallen out of that tree and onto his captor in the Forest of Darney. Esme is looking as if she can’t belive what she is seeing, but Bixby realizes that it all is, indeed, plausible.

The killer is led away, shouting threats.

”I know who you couldn’t save!” he shouts, and Endeavour’s face crumples.

He’s left alone, again contemplating that skyscape of dreaming spires, as the camera fades out to black.

You would think that Endeavour would deserve a respite, but no, in the next scene, a man is killed in a museum with a katar.

Whatever that is. 

“It’s an Indian dagger,” a museum curator, who Bix already suspects is the murderer, says. 

Oh.

And then Endeavour is interviewing a couple who was at the museum, a couple from Massachusetts, visiting Britain to search for their lost grandchild. It’s supposed to be a tender moment, the worn and weary old couple unburdening themselves to the earnest young detective.

“We’ve no mind to go causing trouble, or bustling in on someone’s life unwanted,” the old woman assures him.

“No,” the man agrees. “For all we know, that girl may have found a good man to take her and the child on both, to give them a name and a decent Christian raisin’. We just wanted to find out if there’s some piece of our boy walkin' and talkin' on God’s good earth.”

And Bixby bursts out laughing.

Every single person in the entire theater turns to look at him. Esme prods him, embarrassed.

“I’m sorry,” Bixby manages, breathless. “They’re supposed to be from _Massachusetts_? ‘ _We've no mind to go causin’ trouble?_ ”

They sound like some of the old ladies his mother knew from Tree of Deliverance Church, back in Lafayette County, Mississippi. 

"Well, Grace, you've done your best to give the boy a good Christian' raisin'. It's not your fault Josiah is next door to a perfect heathen." 

And his mother's face would betray only the barest hint of annoyance before she would smile vacantly and pour the sweet tea, because to do otherwise would have been "tacky."

Bix laughs again and Esme prods him again. But he can’t help it.

“They’re supposed to be from _Massachusetts_?” he says helplessly. But English is her second language, and the humor found in an incongruous American accent escapes her.

But Bixby has to laugh. He has to. He has to find some chink in this reality, he has to do _something_ to stop himself from getting too caught up in the images on the screen, to remind himself that it’s not real.

Because it seems, in solving case after case, that Endeavour is growing bolder, more reckless. That Endeavour is heading right toward Blenheim Vale.

Perhaps Bix should get up and go. Endeavour never wanted him to know. It doesn’t seem right, that he should watch any of what’s coming, when Endeavour had never told him about it himself.

There was a day, when they were in Copenhagen, that Bixby had thought to ask him, as if the gold bands they now wore gave him the right to know.

But Endeavour had always made it clear that he preferred to let the past fall away into the past. It seemed more fitting, on that morning, to look ahead to their now officially shared future.

Or maybe it’s not that. Maybe it's nothing to do with Blenheim Vale or prison that has Bixby's heart beating slightly too quickly, too erratically, so that he can feel it struggling under his ribs.

Maybe it's that moment at the party that he can’t bear to watch.

Kay knows exactly how they met; if she is one of the sources, as Bixby suspects that she is, she’ll have it down accurately. They may even film the scene on location, right back at the house on Lake Silence.

Bixby isn’t sure if he wants to sit here in this folded seat and watch that moment unfold, as if between two strangers, before him.

Because there is not much he wouldn’t give for it all to be real, for it to be himself up there on the screen, rather than some actor, watching Endeavour from across the crowded room.

There isn’t a lot he wouldn’t give if the movie could burst into life, to transform the image of Endeavour on the screen into the warm and real weight beside him, to take him all the way back to the night they met, to give Endeavour back to him, so that he could live those thirty years with him all over again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I started hearing Lord Huron's "The Night We Met" as I typed those last lines.... ;-;


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has followed this pair all the way over to this small, little quirky corner of the Morseverse ... (if I can call it that still???) 
> 
> And a special thank you to Chatelaine, for coming up with this imaginative prompt. I never would have thought of this, and it’s been fun to write!
> 
> It’s been a bit of a challenge, flipping the worlds, so to speak—AU and canon—so this all may seem to take some odd turns. I hope you will like the chapter!
> 
> Actually, I realized, this also flips the end of RIDE, where Morse watches the movie depicting Bixby!

As summer of 1967 approaches—the summer Bixby has been waiting with a racing heart to see unfold before him on the wide screen—the storyline grows increasingly surreal.

Was the script writer unable to get anywhere near to the truth of what happened at Blenheim Vale? Or was he given several variations of the truth, and found he had to untangle the twisted threads as best he could?

The records pertaining to the case are still, after all, sealed—and will be for another five years—so it’s most likely that the writer is, indeed, working on the fly.

Bixby isn’t sure what to think, what to expect, as the images on the screen flicker, as an uncannily accurate image of the man who woke up beside him for thirty years is transformed into a stranger, an enigma, a mystery, a tragic hero poised for the fall.

Endeavour races in to the abandoned old building that was once Blenheim Vale Boys’ Home, a place filled with dust and ghosts and shadows, and finds Thursday, his gun raised, lurking in the darkness. For a moment, it looks as if Thursday is about to shoot Endeavour square in the face, and Bixby’s heart leaps beneath his ribs, even though he knows that can’t have happened, or else he and Endeavour would never have met.

Thursday recognizes Endeavour and lowers the gun at once, and they both seem to sag a bit, Endeavour exhaling sharply with relief.

But the moment of respite is short-lived, because then, ACC Deare comes pounding into the room, his eyes wild, raising a gun at the both of them.

“It was you!” he shouts, “You who infiltrated the division. Cowards! Traitors all!”

And, with movements sharp and quick, he raises the gun and shoots Thursday in the chest. 

Endeavour reels around, stunned. “You bastard!” he shouts. “You bastard!”

“That’s all you’ve got to say? I expected more from a signals man,” Deare taunts.

“You’re mad!” Endeavour shouts. “You can’t think you’ll get away with this!”

“Actually, I think they’ll pin another medal on my chest. History is written by the victor, after all!” the madman retorts.

And then, inexplicably, a young woman flies into the room, as if alerted by the sound of gunshots.

What’s she doing in an abandoned school in the dead of night? It’s unclear, but before Endeavour can pull his gun, Deare shoots her and then shoots himself, leaving Endeavour standing in a nightmare of a cavernous and vacant room, one littered with fallen bodies bleeding out on the dusty floor.

What the hell?

The girl is quite clearly dead—there’s nothing Endeavour can do—and so he runs to Thursday, falling hard to his knees.

“Sir? Stay with me, sir. Stay with me,” Endeavour cries, his voice thick with unshed tears.

There is a wail of sirens then, just minutes too late, and police storm into the room. One of the officers turns and shouts, and a team of medics rushes in to tend to Thursday, who is lying prone on the floor in a pool of blood.

Endeavour is pushed aside, and he spins around, confused. Mr. Bright takes hold of his elbow, and intones, reassuringly, in his reedy voice, “We’ll make sure he’s looked after, Morse. He’s in the best of care.”

Endeavour says nothing, only stares blankly after Thursday as he’s carried off on a stretcher.

He doesn’t even seem to register it, at first, when another officer steps smartly in front of him.

“DC Morse?” he asks.

“Yes,” Endeavour says.

“My name is Detective Inspector Gregson of Kidlington CID. Endeavour Morse, I am arresting you for the murder of Chief Constable Rupert . . . .”

Endeavour’s eyes widen. “You’re _arresting_ me?”

“You do not have to say . . . “

“You’ve made a mistake.”

“… can be used in evidence ….”

“....Some kind of mistake....”

“....Take him inside.”

“What?” Endeavour cries.

And of course, Endeavour struggles against them; he can’t believe that it’s happening, he has to believe that it is some sort of mistake.

Even though anyone else might see that, no, it’s all quite intentional.

He’s hustled away into the back of a police car as the scene slowly begins to fade to black.

And then a swell of music comes up, and the camera comes back into focus, and he’s there, sitting on a lower bunk in a prison cell, dressed in a gray jacket, his wide blue eyes looking solemnly into the retreating lens of the camera.

All of the tenets that DC Morse so believed in are falling away with the backward slide of the camera on its tracks—already, he’s becoming Pagan, lost and bewildered and far out of his depth. 

Bixby closes his eyes. He’s not sure what’s coming—he’s not sure if he wants to see Endeavour pacing his cell, Endeavour in the prison yard, Endeavour on the top walk, casting an anxious look over his shoulder.

Bix holds his breath, winces against he sounds he expects to hear—the clang of bars, the scrape of doors, shouts in the corridor, menacing laughter.

But, instead, there is only a rich and resounding voice, rolling out over the theater’s surround sound speakers.

“The finding of this Board is that the tragic events of last December, which led to the shooting of DI Thursday and to the arrest of DC Morse, were due solely to a mental breakdown suffered by ACC Clive Deare. We are also of a view that further investigation into other, extraneous matters would not be in the national interest. To which end, all investigative materials relating to Blenheim Vale Boys’ Home are to be sealed. For fifty years.”

Bix opens his eyes, and for a moment, his heart doesn’t know whether to unclench with relief at what he’s been spared from witnessing, or to race in fevered anticipation—because Endeavour is there, in front of the lake house, his tie tucked in between the buttons of his white shirt, chopping wood.

It’s it! it’s still there! It’s the _actual_ old lake house where Endeavour once lived.

Bixby remembers each knot in the wood siding, familiar as the veins on the back of his hand. How many times did he approach the place, breathless with trepidation and desire, not knowing if he’d be welcomed in or have the door slammed in his face?

He feels it again, that same uncertainty. His heart is pounding, it’s getting closer, the moment that changed his life, Endeavour’s life, the party that changed everything. He sits eagerly on the edge of his seat, wondering how he’ll be portrayed, awaiting his grand entrance.

On the screen, Endeavour, meanwhile, looks less excited; he’s morosely chopping wood when Tony drives up, parking a few feet from where he’s working.

Tony steps out of the car smartly, his usual cheery self, practically bouncing with pride over his new automobile.

“Oh,” Endeavour says, glumly, his face a blank. “I didn’t know who it was.”

Bixby laughs, and, beside him, Esme does, too, shaking her head fondly.

My, what a welcoming way in which to greet one of your oldest friends. But that’s Endeavour all over for you.

“What do you call that?” Endeavour asks.

“Bluebell,” Tony says.

Damn. That was a nice car. Bix had quite forgotten that thing. Is that the original, possibly? 

Endeavour looks unimpressed, but somehow, Tony manages to trundle him off to the Belboroughs, and—it’s strange—along the way, they are stopped by a constable, who tells them that a body has been found in the woods, that of a young woman who had been struck by a car.

Bixby frowns. A woman killed—intentionally mowed over—right in their woods? He doesn’t remember anything of the sort.

The Belboroughs’ drawing room, however, is depicted _exactly_ the way he remembers it—white couches and tall, bright windows, gauzy white curtains that catch and billow and fly in the summer wind.

The friends sit and drink their cocktails in a room filled with brittle, sophisticated laughter and the brittle tinkle of ice in cut-glass tumblers..... and all the talk, of course, is of the party at Bixby’s later that night.

“Bixby? What Bixby?” Endeavour asks.

“Why, everybody knows Bixby,” Pippa says.

Ha! Too right they do. Bixby elbows Esme lightly, raising his eyebrows. Was he it, back in the day, or not? Did he have it or did he have it?

Esme shakes her head, as if he’s an incorrigible schoolboy.

“He’s the one who bought that vulgar pile on the other side of Lake Silence,” Pippa says.

Bixby lets out a cry of protest, while this time, it’s Esme’s turn to laugh.

“Ssshhhh,” hisses a man behind them.

_Vulgar_ _pile_? What’s this? That place was the height of glamour back in the day.

And it worked, didn’t it? Because everyone is there, standing in the diffused glow or rose and aqua and neon green lights—everyone from the ambassador from Mali to the prime minister’s son, making their way through the lamplit dreamworld that was his own creation.

Even Pippa is singing a different tune now. “He must be as rich as Croeses,” she says, gushing in delight. “Some of these things are priceless. Literally.”

And then there’s that damn painting. So. They’re cutting straight to that, are they?

Endeavour stands before the painting, hands clasped primly behind him, as if he’s an appraiser at a museum rather than a guest at one of the decade’s most fantastic parties.

“And some of them are worthless, literally,” he says. “This is a fake. A copy. A good one, but . ..”

.... but the real one hangs in the Rijlikmuseum. Yes, yes, Bixby knows.

But Bix can’t worry about that now, for his heart is beating high up under his ribs. Out of a red glow of party lights, a silhouette is emerging, larger than life, as if descending upon the scene from out of the clouds, flipping a gold gambling chip.

“How do you know?” a rich and warm voice rolls out, from the depths of the red haze of light.

“Because the real one hangs in the Rijksmuseum. I’ve seen it,” Endeavour says.

“Oh? And how do you know that the one in the Rijksmuseum isn’t the copy, and this one the real one?” the man asks.

Endeavour isn't having any of it, and the actor, Shaun Evans, makes that funny little movement—that upwards jerk of the chin Endeavour always made—as if he was using his face to toss someone undesirable away from His Most August Person.

“Uh, I think the curators would have noticed,” he says.

“Perhaps," the man replies, "Or . . ."

He holds out a gold gambling chip, then, and flips it into the air so that it sparkles merrily in the odd light. On its descent, he snatches it up and places it solidly in his palm. And then, with a showy wave of his broad hands, the chip disappears. 

Endeavour snorts a bit and nods to a pedestal, where some prankster has left a top hat on top of a Roman bust.

“Perhaps, for your next trick, you might pull our host from that top hat and we can ask him." 

"Be delighted," the man says, stepping forward, emerging at last from the aura of diffused light. 

He spins on the spot, then, and, in one graceful movement, turns about so that the hat ends up perched on top of his head. He dips the hat off with a flourish and bows.

“Et voila!” Bixby says. 

Bixby sits up straighter in his folding seat. Well, damn. He thought they'd be hard pressed to find someone as good-looking as he is to portray him, but it's uncanny. The actor they found actually does resemble him quite a bit.

On the screen, Bixby straightens, smiling even more broadly. Leaving Endeavour speechless. 

Ha. Enjoy it while it lasts. 

"I’m sorry, old man,” Bixby says. “I thought you knew. I'm Bixby. My friends call me Bix." 

He loops an arm around Endeavour’s shoulder, and guidies him off through jeweled-toned and dazzling rooms, through the spin of roving rainbow-colored lights. The crowds seem to part magically for them as they pass.

They measure up just right together, proceeding forward side by side —and Bixby can’t help a wistful smile at the metaphor—they don’t know it yet, but that’s just how it will be from then on, all through Endeavour’s cases at Oxford, through the debacle of that German holiday, all the way beyond the cusp of a new century.

Well, not a bad first showing. Not exactly as it happened, but near enough. They caught the spirit of them anyway, Bixby's playfulness, Endeavour's standoffishness. The absolute magic when oppositely-charged magnets are flipped and suddenly snap together. 

But, as the movie goes on, the scenes and conversations grow increasingly bizarre, increasingly unfamiliar.

Bixby doesn’t understand. There’s no mention of Bunny, at all. Nor of Henry and Susan. Nor of Julian Morrow or of bacchanals. It was in all the papers—the entire scandal—in the days after Henry’s suicide. The story should have been easy enough to research.

Did someone pay the filmmakers off, to keep that all from resurfacing?

Or did the writer decide that there were so many gaps in the real story that it was easier simply to make up his own?

Because instead, all of the questions and all of the subterfuge and all of the dissembling are circling around the mystery of the girl struck down in the woods, Jeanne Hearne.

“It’s all anyone can talk about,” Tony says, walking with Pagan through the crowded great hall.

And then his doppelganger is in his study, and Thursday is there, asking him about her—she had, it seems, a gambling chip from the Belvedere in her pocketbook.

It’s disorienting, watching his double have a conversation with Thursday that never happened. 

And even more so watching his double have a conversation with Endeavour about the dead girl who, to his knowledge, never existed.

“You know, old man. That’s the second time someone’s mentioned that name to me. The first was a police officer.”

“So is the second,” Endeavour says steadily.

Bixby sits back in his seat, folding his arms, and snorts. As if Endeavour was ever _that_ forthright about his past. Bixby could only have wished.

“Ah,” Bixby’s double says, taking a sip of Scotch, wincing at a split lip laid on him by Belborough, the only detail in the entire scene that is true, that’s familiar.

He sets the glass down.

“Come on, old man. I need to clear my head.”

The scene cuts, and Endeavour and Bix are outside on the dock, moonlit water moving slowly under a canopy of black and of stars and of shadows of softly moving summer leaves, and it’s here, it’s that moment, the one that he knows is bound to twist at his heart. 

“On a night like this, a man might believe that anything is possible.”

Bixby smiles softly. It wasn’t a bad line, really.

Although who could have known he had said that? Had Kay followed them out, to check on Pagan, as she was wont to do in those days?

Well if that’s the case, it was a good thing they they had gone out into the woods before . . .

Dark eyes tinged with sadness shine in starlight, looking steadily into guileless blue ones and then . . . the two actors slowly come together. Bixby’s double puts his hand to Endeavour’s double’s face and leans in for a soft and then steady and then increasingly desperate kiss.

For a moment, the theater is strangely airless; he hadn’t been expecting them to . . .

“They can’t show that,” Bixby hisses to Esme.

“What? Kissing?” Esme asks, with a hint of amusement in her voice.

“You know what I mean,” Bixby whispers back.

My god. The worst falling out he and Endeavour had ever had had been precipitated when Endeavour had kissed him in the middle of Heathrow International Airport.

Now, a few decades later, it’s suddenly fine to take an image of two men kissing as if they need each other’s mouths to breathe, and project it up onto a public movie screen? 

“What year are you living in?” Esme asks. “It’s 2012. Of course, they can.”

Oh, god.

It’s too much, it’s too intense, watching his doppelganger pressing closer to Endeavour’s, locking his mouth into a drawn-out kiss. With their faces flushed together, their features are less distinct, so that there’s only a profile of smooth dark hair against wild and gold-auburn curls, a jawline like his own, heavy with five o’clock shadow, and Endeavour’s sharp and austere one.

From the angle the actors are turned, they look exactly like them. 

It could honestly be them. 

It’s too much. He can almost feel the soft crush of lips tinged with the sweetness of Scotch against his own.

And it’s not fair, either, that these actors, to whom this all means nothing, can stand there on _their_ dock, kissing under the stars, and he and Endeavour can’t. The director will yell, ‘cut,’ and they’ll break apart, laugh awkwardly, perhaps, and then go and sip a couple of overpriced, gourmet coffees from cardboard cups.

But Bixby can’t call ‘cut’ on the last twelve years. He can’t take a coffee break from the reality of his own life. He can’t rewrite the script.

He puts his hand over his eyes, unable to look at the screen. He just never thought watching this would be . . .quite so. . . so visceral….

But Esme misunderstands.

“What?” Esme asks. “You are so old-fashioned. When’s the last time you’ve been to a movie?”

And it’s like another twist, another pain sharp in his gut. Because he really _hasn’t_ been to a movie since... well, not for years, not since Endeavour was no longer able to understand they weren’t supposed to talk in the theater...

.... not that he ever _did_ understand that, really.

He would never utter a syllable during a concert or an opera, but movies, as far as Endeavour was concerned, were fair game. 

It used to drive Bix mad, Endeavour’s endless stream of commentary and critique, but later, he found he couldn’t bear to sit through a film without it.

Bixby smiles at the memory. Suddenly, he’s going back in time, as he so often does these days—as so many do, he supposes, who have far more days behind them than ahead of them—and it’s almost as if he could be here, in this very theater, although instead of Esme, it’s Endeavour sitting beside him. It’s sometime in the late seventies, and Endeavour’s hair is at its wildest, curling madly after the style of the day, right at the point before it abruptly began to turn from red-gold to stark silver.

“Why did you pick this movie?” Endeavour asked, falling gracelessly into his seat. “Seems an odd choice for you.”

“I don’t know, old man,” Bixby replied. “Everyone’s talking about it, all right? My job is not like yours. I have to talk to people—it’s part of making a deal, making small talk, and I think we’re possibly the only two people on earth who haven’t seen the thing.”

“It’s awfully pessimistic, isn’t it? I mean, if humankind reaches the point where we can navigate the stars, certainly we won’t be dragging our wars along with us.”

“They’re not human. They’re people from another planet,” Bixby said.

For a beat, Endeavour said nothing.

“What?” he asked, his voice impassive. “Do you expect me to believe that somewhere, creatures evolved who look precisely like us? Do you know what the odds are of that?”

But then, the lights dimmed, and Endeavour didn’t have the chance to tell him what, indeed, were the odds—a figure which, doubtless, Endeavour was all too ready to produce, down to the last decimal point.

They managed to make it quite aways into the film, before Endeavour asked, “How does the man in the black mask know this Luke fellow?”

“He doesn’t,” Bixby whispered. “He’s just the bad guy.”

“Seems awfully driven. There must be some motivation.”

“He’s the bad guy, alright? It’s just a movie.”

Endeavour nodded solemnly.

“He’s his father,” he pronounced.

“What?”

Endeavour sighed. “This Luke is learning to use a lightning bolt. They’re Zeus and Cronus. Isn’t it obvious? Why else would they make such a point of it, too, that he lives with his aunt and uncle? He’s the hero with uncertain origins.”

“Would you just watch the movie? He’s not his father.”

“All right,” Endeavour said, slouching back into his seat. He picked up the popcorn cup that was in the holder between them and began munching at it, mournfully.

“Is this all you have?” he asked.

“What? Do you want some JuJu Fruits or something?”

“No,” Endeavour said. “I mean . . .” Then he mimed pouring a bottle of Scotch into his paper cup of Fanta.

“ _Shhhhh_ ,” came a voice from behind them.

Bixby turned away, pointedly. Not bloody likely. Endeavour certainly didn’t need a _Scotch_ just to sit through a two-hour film.

“Might make this more endurable, is all I’m saying,” Endeavour said, with a hint of a disdainful laugh in his voice.

“Sorry,” Bixby said. “I don’t think Scotch is on order at the concession stand.”

Endeavour slumped, then, defeated in his seat. He was quiet for a while, limiting his commentary to pulling all sorts of faces, rolling his eyes at any piece of dialogue he considered over the top.

He managed quite well at keeping his thoughts to himself, all the way until Han Solo and Princess Leia’s first sparring match.

“Well, ring out the wedding bells. Those two are obviously getting together.”

” _Shhhhhh_!”

“What?” Bixby asked.

“It’s the oldest story in the book, isn’t it? The one who has it all together and the complete disaster? The cool and composed intellectual and the never-do-well with a dodgy past and a gambling problem? They’re obviously meant to be.”

“ _Shhhhhh_!”

Bixby smiles to himself, lost, for a space, in the comfort of the past. It isn’t until he hears Esme stir beside him, that he comes back to himself.

“Oh, my god,” she says.

Bixby turns to her, confused, as she puts a hand up over her face, as if to shield her eyes.

A breathy and desperate moan draws Bixby’s eyes back to the screen. The actors are really going to town; his double is planting kisses along Endeavour’s doppelganger’s throat as the head of curls is thrown back, and then he’s struggling with Endeavour’s pearl-covered buttons, pulling the white dress shirt back from pale and narrow shoulders and . . . . . .

Bixby ducks his head.

“What’s this rated?”

“I don’t know.”

“Esme. What’s this rated?”

“I don’t know!” she says.

If he weren’t so mortified, he’d feel vindicated. Esme is always after him about how “repressed” he is, about all of his “identity issues.”

Identity issues. She has no idea.

But, now, how does she like these apples? The only way this could be more awkward for her is if it were doubles of her own _parents_ having at each other, right before her eyes, projected up onto the enormous screen.

Bix chances a look, and, by the time the actors are more or less pulling each other to the ground, the camera is thankfully, fading up into the branches, up into the stars.

A woman who is sitting behind them, with bright silver hair and dangling silver earrings, hisses at them.

“This is one of the most beautiful love stories of our time. You people need to get with the twenty-first century.”

Bix and Esme both slump down low in their seats, keeping their eyes straight ahead, as if to be invisible from the rest of the audience and from one another.

*** 

By the time Bixby is able to begin processing the flashing images before him, flickering in the darkness of the theater, Endeavour is back at home in his untidy little lake house, listening to one of his most histrionic records, when there is a gunshot.

He races to the dock and leaps into the water. He flounders around in the dark, and emerges with a . . . a body?

He pulls it out of the water, crying out into the darkness.

And it’s him! It’s him! A body wearing his suit! But his face is completely . . .

Bixby lurches bolt upright in his seat.

“What in the hell?” Bixby cries.

“ _Sssshhhhh_!”

An explosion of hisses sound through the theater, as Bixby looks helplessly to Esme, as if she can somehow provide some explanation.

She returns his surprised expression, equally stunned. 

When he looks back to the screen, Endeavour’s double is there, in the foreground, sitting beneath a tree, staring into the distance, looking utterly lost, a jacket strewn over his shoulders.

Behind him, slightly out of the camera’s focus, DeBryn is crouching beside a body.

So. DeBryn is cutting him up, is he?

How fitting.

The man already did so a hundred times with some of the looks he gave him over the years.

Bixby can scarcely believe it. What? Is he getting killed off twenty-seven minutes into his screen time? Completely written out of his own story? As if he doesn’t . . .

As if Joss Bixby doesn’t exist?

But no. Because what follows is a hundred times more baffling, a hundred times more disturbing.

Somehow, he has a deranged identical twin. Who is nearsighted.

Is that even possible?

The father of the twins is a carnival magician, a man who flipped a coin to determine his sons’ fates. One of his children was allowed to grow up, to go outside, to live. The other was kept stowed away, hidden in their small caravan, all for the sake of a cheap carnival disappearing act.

It’s all ghastly. Who would do such a thing?

And although the way that his own life is portrayed is utterly disorienting—makes him to feel like a small figure in a souvenir snow globe, rolled upside down and shaken about—it’s this image of his father—cold and ruthless and utterly deranged—that tears at Bix’s heart.

His father, who would come home after a long day, leaving his muddied boots on the front porch, and put a sinewy and toughened hand on the small of his mother’s back as she stood at the stove, laying it there as gently as a feather, and saying, “smells delicious, Gracie,” even when it _didn’t_ smell delicious, even when it was just everlasting collards.

His father, who would wink at him as he produced an old newspaper he’d procured from Trey Bixton’s study, who would laugh as Joss spread the stock pages across the floor of their small, dogtrot house.

His father, who was the first to stand up in the bleachers and cheer, well before Josiah had even reached end zone for the touchdown, so much faith he had in him.

Oh, god, Pa.

I’m sorry.

I’m just so sorry.

On the screen, it’s a clear watercolor blue morning, and Endeavour is crossing the lawns, carrying a record player and a suitcase, with his iconic satchel—a satchel Bixby knows Endeavour does not really own at this point, since it was he himself who gave it to him the first year they lived in France—strapped over his shoulder.

Behind the wheel of a canary yellow convertible parked before the grand house at Lake Silence, a dark-haired man is waiting.

“Bix?” Endeavour asks.

And the camera cuts to the dark-haired man, who smiles a warm Bixby smile, his dark eyes alight with laugher, and says, “Ready for the off, old man?”

What’s this? Is it he, then, who survived, after all, and the deranged twin who was murdered? Or did the madman succeed in completely absconding with his identity?

Because it’s not clear, now, which of the twins was shot and which survived. It’s surreal; it’s almost as if the filmmaker is leaving it up to the audience’s interpretation.

Did Endeavour spend the rest of his days, not with the man who he had met and kissed at the party, but with a stranger, a man with no past, a man who had spent his entire life hidden in the darkness?

And suddenly Bixby realizes.

Blenheim Vale isn’t the incomprehensible riddle, the gaping hole, in Endeavour’s life.

He is.

Endeavour was right. The statute of limitations must surely have run out by now, hadn’t it? And the way Hayward Four lived, he must long since be dead.

It was just as Bix had once told Pagan, on that long ago night, after that gala in London.

_“There’s nothing wrong with your name. You should use it.”_

_Endeavour scowled, furrowing his brow._

_“You do know,” Bixby said, “if you don’t use your name, other people will go ahead and come up with a name for you, don’t you?”_

_Endeavor stilled at this._

_“I suppose that might be true,” he said._

Could it be that, what he had said to Endeavour about one's name could be equally true about one's past?

You do know—Endeavour might have said—if you don’t tell people about your past, people will go ahead and come up with one for you, don’t you?

_You see, old man, the truth is all together dull…._

If he could have, after all of these years, finally have had the courage to tell the truth, to relax his guard at last, this movie could have played out quite differently— his path running sweetly alongside Endeavour’s, through twin green and lovely countrysides, one in Lincolnshire, one in Lafayette County, until they met in the City of Dreaming Spires, meandering from that point on together, merging into a well-worn path through the woods of Lorraine.

It’s possible that the scriptwriter might even have _preferred_ the real story. Filmmakers do seem to love the American South; the Spanish moss, the torpor of heat and humidity, the spreading water oaks as ancient as any landmark of Europe, reaching as high and as broad as any cathedral, the muddy bank of a lazy river, bumblebees hovering over fruit decaying in tall grass, peeling paint on ionic columns, the pert mocking bird sitting on a limb, the slowly revolving ceiling fans, the dissipation and the condensation on a glass left by the front porch swing. 

Suddenly, he can see it, how he might have been introduced. Suddenly, he’s again going back in time, to the day that he took his first steps in becoming Joss Bixby.

Suddenly, he’s fourteen and he’s following, for the first time, his father and the rest of the men into the great house.

They filed quietly into Trey Bixton’s study; the man was on the phone as they came in, and he paid them no attention, but rather continued talking, waving his hands to emphasize a phrase, banging his fist on the desk by way of inserting an exclamation point.

But that was as to be expected. He was important, after all, and they were not. They were waiting on his time, not he on theirs.

He hung up then, confirming his investments with some unseen advisor, and looked up to them to speak.

But Josiah cut him off before he could open his mouth.

“I wouldn’t do that, sir,” Josiah said.

Josiah’s father stilled beside him, but didn’t step away.

“What’s that, boy?” Bixton asked.

“Those are all a string of flops, what you done put your money in,” Josiah said.

“They are, are they?”

“Yessir.”

The room fell quiet for a moment, so that the air felt as heavy as the cattail marsh in August, as thick as molasses in January. The men shuffled as they stood, doubtless wondering what Clem’s boy was on about.

But Trey Bixton smiled. He could not have been more amused if a possum had come in and offered him a glass of bourbon.

“So. Where do you reckon I should put my money, then?”

“Delta,” Josiah said.

“What? The airline? The one that’s moved its headquarters to Atlanta?”

“Yessir. Come a time when people will hop on a plane same as a Greyhound bus. They’ll come a time when the Atlanta airport will be the busiest in the whole world.”

The men broke into laughter.

“ _Atlanta_?” Bixton asked incredulously, once the room had quieted. 

“Yessir.”

“Listen to the oracle,” Bixton laughed. He sat back, placing one thick hand on top of his polished maple desk.

“This your boy Clem?”

“Yes sir,” his father said.

“Hmmmmm....,” Trey Bixton said. He turned back to Joss, scrutinizing him. “What makes you say that, anyhow?”

“Two things, sir.”

“And what are those?”

“Air-conditioning and algorithms.” 

For a moment, the old man said nothing, considering him. And Joss did not look away.

“So you think you know better than my man in New York?” he asked, sharply, at last.

Josiah shrugged. “If that’s what he’s done told you, I reckon do.”

“You know what?” Bixton said. “I’ll do it. If I make anything out of it, I’ll give you the same commission I’d give my stockbroker. How’s that sound, hey?”

“You ain’t got to give me nothing, sir. I’m just giving you advice, is all.” Josiah said.

“You just broke the first rule of business, boy. Don’t let me hear you say that again.”

And the man was right. Just as his mama always told him, he wouldn’t get nowhere if didn’t talk better. And who classier to emulate than that English doctor who mama was always sighing over on her radio stories?

“Oh,” Josiah amended. “You don’t have to give me a thing, old man. Happy to do it.”

Trey Bixton huffed a rueful laugh. “Now you sound like that English feller the wife’s always listening to on her soap operas.”

He narrowed his eyes, then.

“But don’t let me hear you say that, either. You give something, you get something. First rule of making a deal, fair and square. You got that, boy?”

“Yessir,” Josiah said.

And Trey Bixton picked up the phone.

For months, nothing more was said about it. School started again, and Joss helped his father only in the afternoons. In the mornings, he sat—bored to tears in math class, because it was all so obvious, and bored out of his ever-living skull in English class, because it was all so incomprehensible.

Mrs. Bellwether had an obsession with William Faulkner, and she seemed bound and determined to raise a Faulkner of very her own out right of the same Lafayette County soil. Even though such an event was, statistically speaking, unlikely.

“The odds are… lightning don’t strike twice, ma'am."

“ _Doesn’t_ strike twice, Josiah." 

Why couldn’t she just let them be who they were meant to be? Who knew what greatness they might achieve, being their own blessed selves? Why insist they try to force themselves inside another man’s skin, a man who didn’t ask for no such honor, nohow?

Joss couldn’t stomach that blasted Faulkner. The jumps in narrative were bad enough in those crazy novels, but the worst thing about them was—what addled all those rich folks, exactly? That crazy ol' Compson family? There’s folks is poor through no fault of their own, and there’s folks that lost all their money through an utter lack of the imagination.

Those ol’ Compsons moped about something fierce. 

Finally—Josiah wasn’t quite sure how it happened, if perhaps one of the parents from town complained about the limited curriculum—his certainly would never have had a mind to—they got to read something else.

Amen and Hallelujah.

The Great Gatsby. Now _there_ was a man who knew what money was for. If Joss had all that dough, he’d do just that. Buy a big house and turn life into one long party, with food and music and dancing and cards and all the things that the church ladies at Tree of Deliverance warned might lead to too much temptation, but sure as hell made for a lot of fun.

Then one afternoon, during the depths of a hot and relentless Indian Summer, during that spike in heat and humidity that always fell at the end of September, he followed his father and the other men into Trey Bixton’s study.

And the old man quietly slipped an envelope to him across the desk.

One that was full of cold, hard cash. 

“You can’t give him all that,” his father protested.

“The boy earned it, fair and square.”

“ _Fair and square, old man."_

It’s Endeavour’s story and not his, and so there wouldn’t be time to follow its winding thread. There wouldn't be time for the camera to cut to the lawyer’s office, where, after the death of his parents and after the death of Trey Bixton, he sat alone with Bixton’s only son and heir, Hayward Four, how the attorney read out the will as a ceiling fan slowly revolved overhead, how Hayward Four had stopped outside the door as they left and snarled, “You’ll never see one red cent of that, Taylor.”

There would not be the time to show how Josiah Taylor nodded quietly and left the room. And then left town, sweet-talking his way into a job at the First National Bank in Jackson, where Trey Bixton's estate was held in trust.

There wouldn’t be time to show how he had slowly transferred the funds in Bixton’s account to his own fictitious one, taking exactly the amount that Bixton had left to him—not only because that was what was fair and square, but, because, when the money was discovered missing, he wanted Hayward Four to take note of the exact amount gone, down to the last red cent.

He wanted Hayward Four to know.

The filmmakers wouldn’t have time to pan the camera over the thick and green Mississippi woods, to sharpen the camera's focus onto a pair of railroad tracks cutting through the trees, as Josiah Taylor jumped onto the back of the first northbound train that went screaming out of town, leaving his old self behind, refashioning himself into someone else. 

They’d never catch him. 

Because he was Joss Bixby. 

And Joss Bixby didn’t exist. 

And Joss Bixby . . . . didn’t exist.

On the screen, Endeavour and Bixby are boarding the plane to France. Endeavour casts one last look over his shoulder, and it’s difficult to say why he is fleeing the country without the backdrop of the tumult and confusion of the real story that brought them together—Bunny’s murder.

Bunny’s murder, which brought to light another murder, that of Richard Williams ten years earlier, which in turn led to the terrible crashing of events—Susan’s breakdown, Henry’s suicide, Endeavour and Pippa’s realizations that, in many ways, they had lived within a crucible of lies for most of their adult lives.

But in this version of events, Endeavour has solved the case of the murder of Jeanne Hearne.

So why would he be skipping the country with a stranger? Running away with someone he knows so little about, whose identity is so uncertain?

Is Bixby the man who he kissed on the dock, or is he his deranged twin? 

But, Bix supposes, there is a truth in that.

He did flee with a stranger.

Joss Bixby would never get caught.

Because Joss Bixby didn't exist.

But perhaps that isn’t so, either. Joss Bixby may have started out as a role, a game, a mask. But, year after year, he had taken on a life of his own, building new memories, fighting new battles, becoming a false man who had found a love that was true. 

A love that made him true.

It’s really the only thing that Endeavour ever called him. 

“ _Bix_?”

In those early days, Bixby had often wished that Endeavour might switch to Joss, but the transition never fully came. Perhaps it was because by the time Endeavour knew that it was, indeed, his true name, the habit of calling him Bix had become too deeply ingrained—in much the same way that Endeavour called Fred “Inspector Thursday” long after his retirement and Win “Mrs. Thursday” even when he was older than she had been when they had first met.

But it was all right. Over the years, he grew accustomed to it. Grew even to listen for it.

_"Bix?"_

The single syllable dropped from his mouth as easily as summer rain. He said the three letters thousands of times over the decades, in a hundred different intonations—it was everything from a question, to a sigh of exasperation, to an exclamation of laughter, to a cry of passion, panted warmly in his ear.

He said the word so often, that even now, at odd moments, a well-worn synapse, one that must have carried the sound often to Bixby’s conscious mind, seems to misfire, so that he can imagine that he hears it, even though Endeavour is gone and such a thing is impossible.

“ _Bix_?”

It was what he called him even at the end.

On the wide and glowing screen, Endeavour and Bixby sink into a pair of airplane seats and look at one another, their expressions inscrutable. In many ways, they are strangers, and they just now seem to realize that.

Bizarrely, Bixby finds himself feeling worried for them. It seems rather an extreme leap to take.

What is Endeavour doing, going off to a foreign land with someone so suspect, and not a penny to his name?

And what is Bixby doing? Does he not see that there’s something wrong there, something off about that, something more worrisome than a case of an artistic temperament and too much Scotch?

“ _Bix_?”

And there it is, that sweet misfire, and it’s as if Endeavour is right there, in the next seat to him, the real and warm weight beside him, with a love so honest and true as to give life to a man who lived only on a counterfeit passport. 

The plane begins its ascent, and Endeavour and Bixby look at one another once more. It’s too late now, they are taking off, their course united, for better or worse, from here on out.

_“Bix?”_

And through his clouded haze of melancholy and loneliness and regret, Bixby can almost imagine that Endeavour is right beside him, munching mournfully on a handful of popcorn. 

He can almost imagine that he hears Endeavour’s voice in his ear, offering a running commentary as he always did at the movies, watching the images of their doppelgängers on the screen with a jaundiced eye.

“It’s the oldest story in the book, isn’t it?” he asks. “The one who has it all together and the complete disaster? The cool and composed intellectual and the never-do-well with a dodgy past and a gambling problem?”

Endeavour laughs then, and whispers, 

“They’re obviously meant to be.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! If anyone has any backstory they’d like to see in the next chapter (or two?) please let me know! I do have more of Monica coming up as well as Ken Wilding...

**Author's Note:**

> Essentially, this is an AU that plans to make canon the AU.....
> 
> Wait. What? XD


End file.
